


graduation

by taywen



Category: Scholomance - Naomi Novik
Genre: Class Differences, Extended Scene, Gen, Immediately Post-A Deadly Education
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:27:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26827348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taywen/pseuds/taywen
Summary: Clarita Acevedo-Cruz graduates from the Scholomance, and carries a few of New York enclave’s kids along with her.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 152





	graduation

**Author's Note:**

> the first few lines of dialogue are taken directly from the book; the rest is pure speculation on my part. initially, this was supposed to be part of a story where various characters ruminate upon The Mystery of El. it went a little off the rails!

El and Lake—Orion—were already at the stairwell when Clarita thought to look around for them.

“El! Orion!” El paused, but Orion was already dashing headlong up the stairs. Clarita gestured for them: her alliance would gladly take Orion, and they’d accept El too, in exchange. Clarita would gladly shove Todd out into the void to make room for El alone, if any of the others objected. “You’re not going to make it before the cleansing starts! Don’t be crazy!”

There was a moment when Clarita almost thought—but then El shook her head, and ran up the steps after Orion.

Clarita lingered in the doorway of Annabel’s room, staring at the empty stairwell where El had been just seconds before, even as the artifice hidden in the ceiling began to creak and groan in preparation for the cleansing. Then River and Jessamy seized her arms and hauled her into the room. Todd slammed the door shut behind them; Annabel was already casting the Aegis Ward.

Todd stayed by the door, his head half-turned away, as if he could avoid looking out at the void at the far end of Annabel’s room. Or maybe he thought if he got too close, one of them would push him into it and claim he’d died in the graduation hall. It was always a mad press to escape, and even if someone did notice Todd’s absence then, no one would call the rest of his alliance on it: he was a poacher.

Clarita accepted the glass of water River pressed into her hand gratefully, forcing herself to take measured sips rather than chug it down. They had a few minutes before the cleansing finished, and it would be a few more after that before their dorm reached its final destination.

“Did you fix it?” Jessamy asked.

Clarita nodded, and drained the rest of the glass. “No telling if it will activate, but Wen was confident.” She’d never taken Mandarin, something she’d seriously regretted down in the graduation hall when she had no idea what was wrong with their pre-assembled replacement artifice, but the repair crew’s triumph had been unmistakable at the end.

“Good,” said Todd.

None of them answered him; they’d spoken to him as little as possible, since Mika. The thundering roar of the mortal flame rose to a crescendo in the corridor outside as the cleansing artifice rolled past, plausible enough reason not to have heard him. Clarita only imagined the heat of it seeping through the door. She’d never been in a position to have an Aegis cast over the door during the biannual cleansings before, so she was familiar with the heat transfer that usually came with them.

Clarita checked over her equipment mechanically. Shieldholder in place. Shoes securely fastened. Rucksack of essential belongings firmly on her back. It was stupid, but her thoughts lingered on El and Orion. There was no way they’d made it to the junior res hall before the cleansing started, and even if they had, the odds of one of them having a room close to that particular stairwell were vanishingly small; everyone else would’ve already had theirs barricaded against the mortal flame and the mals trying to escape it.

Outside, the distant roaring of mortal flame died away. A few seconds later, the whole room—the entire res hall—lurched into motion. The grinding and thumping of the school’s internal artifice dragging them steadily down was louder than the cleansing had been.

No point in dwelling on the juniors’ fates while she was _literally going back into the fray_. Either they’d survived, or they hadn’t. And even if they had—well, then Clarita would find out in a year, because with El to curb the worst of Orion’s self-sacrificing, heroic tendencies, the pair of them would definitely make it out of the Scholomance alive. Assuming Clarita herself survived the rest of today. So it was the height of stupidity to worry about them, when she still wasn’t out of the fire herself.

She did regret that neither of them had decided to attempt graduation a year early. They probably could have done it, even without months of preparation or a solid alliance. Forget her own alliance, widely considered to be one of the strongest of their year; _any_ of the senior alliances would’ve taken Orion on in a heartbeat, and they’d have accepted El with him. Orion really was absurdly strong and well-suited to slaughtering mals but Clarita wasn’t sure that El wouldn’t have been the wiser pick. What she’d done with the shield after David and Maya failed—

The room stopped shuddering. Annabel didn’t bother trying to tidy up the fallen shelves or fix the bed: this wasn’t her room anymore. Clarita and the other witches exchanged grim looks, then Clarita reached around Todd and opened the door. Other seniors were emerging too, moving carefully for the nearest exit. Their alliance shifted into formation without a word, Todd slotting in like he belonged. He didn’t, but they couldn’t afford to lose him. Even if the artifice in the graduation hall had activated, there would still be some mals remaining. And his parents were too high up in New York enclave to alienate; if Todd managed to make it out without them, he wouldn’t hesitate to let his family know the rest of the alliance had turfed him, and there went her guaranteed spot at the world’s premier enclave.

When they reached the corridor that had for four years led from the dorms into the school proper, they were greeted by one of two waiting rooms instead. Five minutes after the senior dorm dropped down to the school’s lowest level, the corridors would seal and the far wall of the waiting rooms on either side of the graduation hall would slide open.

The waiting room was far larger than the maintenance shaft had been, but if Vinh or any of the other maintenance track students were in the crowd here, Clarita couldn’t pick them out. Either way, no one made an effort to see through the wall as they’d done an hour earlier: the front half of the large space was empty, leaving the back half uncomfortably cramped. No one wanted to be the first one out of the gate.

Turned out Todd’s poaching was actually good for one thing: people still gave him a slight berth, opening some breathing room up around their alliance. They were near the front of the pack, but far enough back that if any really dangerous mal was waiting for them—and there’d been _a lot_ when they’d gone down to fix the artifice—they’d probably be out of its range while it went for the frontlines.

The room was nearly silent, apart from the sound of several hundred teenagers breathing. A few groups whispered here and there, but Clarita didn’t bother listening in to discern the actual words. River had been tasked with keeping time, and she held up two fingers: two more minutes before the wall before them opened.

Clarita tightened her grip on Jessamy’s hand, took a deep breath, and murmured the first line of her shield song. Her empty hand curled into a fist, reaching for someone that was no longer there—Stupid, really. She’d only cast her shield song a handful of times with the other four; she’d been practicing it for months with her alliance, so any of them would be able to step in if Jessamy faltered.

And she still wished that it was El, not Jessamy, beside her. Not David—he’d been wild with jealousy when she was named valedictorian over him, but also one of the vanishingly few other students in the class that’d had a chance of keeping up with her, miles ahead of the rest of her alliance—or Maya or Angel. Hell, she’d thought El and Angel would be the weaker links, but they had held the shield with her until the end.

El especially had surprised her. El, a junior, a nobody whom Clarita had never spared a second glance before the rest of her alliance started complaining about her two weeks ago. Apparently all the younger New York enclavers had to talk about was their golden boy taking up with an unknown loser from—well, they didn’t actually know. Presumably somewhere in the UK, from her accent; possibly Wales, according to some of Clarita’s London connections. Clarita still wasn’t sure what El’s last name was, and discreet inquiries on the topic had turned up nothing of use either.

It was hard to imagine that El had never told anyone her full name, but then again—it had taken almost a month after securing her position as valedictorian before most people could keep it in their heads that Clarita was from Argentina too. Todd still thought she was from Brazil, and River thought that he deserved points for getting the continent right the one time Clarita had made the mistake of mentioning it.

Thinking about it just made her angry, and she didn’t have time for that. Here and now, River lifted her left hand, all five fingers raised, then four, then three—Clarita pushed it all down with the ease of long practice: three years of keeping her head down, doing her work, taking enough maintenance shifts that everyone else thought she was trying for that track on top of everything else—and kept reciting the song as the wall before them started to grind open.

The graduation hall was still sweltering from its recent cleansing, the air that blasted through the steadily-growing opening thick with smoke and ash. A ragged cheer went up, hastily stifled: just because the artifice had activated didn’t mean they were in the clear yet. There would definitely still be mals waiting for them.

Technically, what Clarita, Wen, Vinh and the others had done had all been accomplished before, most recently and famously by the venerable Sir Alfred of the great Manchester enclave. Sir Alfred had had a larger party and far more skilled artificers and incanters, and the majority of them wound up eaten by mals. Only two of the students’ group had died, neither of whom had been swallowed by maw-mouths in the process like the school’s ill-fated founder.

The air of the graduation hall fairly shimmered with lingering heat as the first of this year’s graduating class moved towards the hall proper. They’d all have to be in it in the next five minutes, or else risk getting cornered in one of the waiting rooms.

Patience and Fortitude still loomed on either side of the Scholomance’s exit, but the eerie, shifting surface of eyes and teeth and tendrils had all boiled away, leaving them seemingly quiescent blobs. Most of the lesser mals were gone too, though there had been so many of them that the mortal flame hadn’t managed to burn all of the remains away, and as the first of this year’s graduating class stepped into the hall, then broke into runs towards the exit, the chime of sirenspiders stirring tinkled down from above. Their thick shells _would_ have afforded them some protection from the flames.

Being first out the gate was probably second only to being the last straggler in terms of pecking order: usually the graduates at the front would get eaten by the faster mals, distracting them long enough that the rest of the class could move out. But the chayenas had been thoroughly culled by Orion earlier, and it looked like the cleansing had taken care of the rest. Going first was actually a decent strategy this year.

“Let’s go,” said Annabel, in the space after Jessamy had finished her line but before Clarita started her own.

Even with New York enclave’s power-sharer, maintaining her shield song while running like hell—out of hell would probably be more accurate—was a struggle. She’d just had to hold it for over an hour, and she didn’t have El or Angel with her this time, or Orion slaughtering hordes of mals. There weren’t any _hordes_ , but enough of the damn things had survived the cleansing that it wasn’t just an easy sprint to the gates.

Todd, Annabel and River did well enough keeping the surviving mals away. There was a moment when Todd pushed too close to the shield’s edge, fending off a singed-looking grogler. She could have pulled the shield back then, exposed him—

But she didn’t. She wasn’t some spoiled enclave kid who would push someone out into the dark to save herself, and she wouldn’t push him out into the dark just because he _was_.

The exit loomed before them, flanked by Patience and Fortitude, and then she was staggering out into the light. The transition from being in a dubiously-real school floating in the void to stepping onto terra firma was thoroughly disorienting. Not as bad as when she’d dropped into the Scholomance as a freshman—and she was a lot hardier now than she’d been back then—but she still stumbled.

Jessamy’s hand slipped out of her grasp as the other witch fell to her knees, all but collapsing to the ground. Clarita’s momentum carried her forward for several more steps, the shield winking out around them, before she came to a stop. River slumped to the ground next to Jessamy, and Todd bent almost double a few feet away, panting for breath. Annabel dropped down next to the others a second later.

Clarita’s alliance had made it through graduation unscathed; she was part of New York enclave now in everything but name. It didn’t feel as exultant as Clarita had thought it would; finding her name printed boldly at the top of the senior ranking placard had felt better than this, than what should have been the culmination of basically her entire life’s work up until this exact moment.

The gate to the Scholomance still loomed behind them, just a little hard to look at, a dark cave lit periodically by flashes of spells, screams and snarls still drifting out of its hungry mouth. But it hadn’t swallowed her.

The air was cool but undeniably fresh. Clarita took a deep breath, then slowly lifted her head, squinting in the light: even cloudy and grey, it was brighter than just about every day for the past four years. Bright enough that she didn’t have to see the bursts of her fellow seniors’ spells, and as she slowly moved forward, even the sounds of battle faded away too.

The Scholomance’s exit wasn’t a secret—who would _want_ to enter the cursed place, besides mals—but it had been built in the middle of nowhere. The school’s whole purpose was to lure mals in, of course. Each of the enclaves that sent their children to the school also sent a team to drive away any mals that might have been waiting to prey on the unwary seniors stumbling out on graduation day: Clarita could see them keeping a careful distance from the survivors even now.

Behind her, more and more seniors stumbled out of the Scholomance, their gasps of relief or cries of pain or bodily thumps as they collapsed onto safe ground carried away on the breeze. She could smell rain upon it, fresh and cleansing and cool.

“Clarita,” Jessamy called. The rest of them had struggled back to their feet when Clarita glanced over.

“Is everyone all right?” She hadn’t thought to ask—they’d all made it out, after all—but she couldn’t see any blood on them. She looked the worst off, streaked with dust and splattered with a bit of blood courtesy of the mission earlier.

“Yeah,” said Annabel. The others all nodded.

Todd straightened up out of the hunch he’d adopted since he poached Mika’s room. “That’s my dad!” He sounded unbearably childish, but considering the circumstances—as little as Clarita was inclined to do so—it could be overlooked. If there was any chance her family would be here, she’d have been looking for them just as urgently as the rest of her alliance.

But maybe she could bring her family into New York enclave too, on the strength of what she’d accomplished just before graduation.

“Is that Magistra Ophelia—?” River’s eyes were impossibly wide.

Jessamy smiled at Clarita. “She’ll probably want news of her son. I’m sure Orion gave one of the others a letter, but—”

“Of course.” Clarita smiled back, though nothing in particular made her _want_ to. Besides, the last she’d seen of Orion, he was headed straight for certain death in the cleansing. She’d tell the Magistra about Orion’s essential part in repairing the graduation hall artifice and leave it at that.

Todd was already sprinting over to a man who had the same hair and jaw; Clarita followed him at a more sedate pace, with the others. Evidently, none of them had parents waiting with the New York team.

Ophelia Rhys-Lake had the same platinum hair as Orion, faintly luminous in the pale light, but where there was the promise of future power and gravitas in Orion’s young face, the Magistra had settled in fully to her position and influence.

“Magistra Ophelia, this is the valedictorian from our class,” Jessamy said politely, “Clarita Acevedo-Cruz.”

The Magistra’s eyes were cool, but not unwelcoming. Her face remained perfectly neutral as she took Clarita in. “A pleasure, Clarita.”

“Where are you fr—?” one of the other New York enclavers started to ask, before Clarita could respond, but she fell silent as soon as the Magistra turned her head ever so slightly toward her. Not a forbidding glare, or even a censuring look—just the promise of one. Who could expect anything less from the witch widely accepted as the next Domina of the world’s most prominent enclave?

“The pleasure’s mine, Magistra,” Clarita murmured, tucking a strand of wayward hair behind her ear. Then she added, without any hint of how it galled her to do so, “I’m from Argentina.”

Above them, the first drops of rain began to splatter down. The Magistra flicked her fingers, conjuring a small shield above her head, before any could land upon her. She beckoned Clarita with a similarly economic gesture, leading her a discreet distance away from the rest of the group.

Another murmured spell, and the shield broadened to cover Clarita as well, just as the sky really opened up and began to pour. Todd’s father cursed, but the sound was oddly muffled considering how close they still were to the rest of the New York enclavers: the shield must have had sound dampening properties too. “There was no mention of you in the letters from last year, or from any of the previous graduating class, Ms. Acevedo-Cruz. I must confess to some curiosity: how did a complete unknown become valedictorian? It must have been a brilliant strategy,” the Magistra added, which was honestly not how Clarita had expected her to end the request.

It wasn’t enough to soothe away Clarita’s unease completely, but something hot and clenched tight in her chest loosened ever so slightly. She took a breath of the cool, damp air and said, “It wasn’t easy…”


End file.
